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EARTH DAY 2024

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged A. R. Ammons, Bill Griffin, Catherine Carter, Earth Day 2024, ecology, Ecopoetry, Marjorie Saiser, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Robinson Jeffers, Walt Whitman on April 22, 2024| 5 Comments »

April 22, 2024

Whatever attributes we claim as unique to the human species, such as our propensity for art and science and spirituality – these are gifts of the ground. Curiosity and exploration and awe require a world – a ground – to grow up from and in conversation with.

++++++ Eileen Crist, ecologist, 4/22/24, in The Sun, December 2020

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In Memoriam Mae Noblitt

This is just a place:

we go around, distanced,

yearly in a star’s

atmosphere, turning

daily into and out of

direct light and

slanting through the

quadrant seasons: deep

space begins at our

heels, nearly rousing

us loose: we look up

or out so high, sight’s

silk almost draws us away:

this is just a place:

currents worry themselves

coiled and free in airs

and oceans: water picks

up mineral shadow and

plasm into billions of

designs, frames: trees,

grains, bacteria: but

is love a reality we

made here ourselves—

and grief—did we design

that—or do these,

like currents, whine

in and out among us merely

as we arrive and go:

this is just a place:

the reality we agree with,

that agrees with us,

outbounding this, arrives

to touch, joining with

us from far away:

our home which defines

us is elsewhere but not

so far away we have

forgotten it:

this is just a place.

A. R. Ammons (1926 – 2001)

Shared by Jane Hazelman, Elkin, NC, who writes:

My only comments would be… and it’s interesting, now that I think carefully about it…

This poem caught me at time when I was grieving the loss of my father who died the same week my family moved to NC…. I felt the ground beneath my feet dropping away… I needed an anchor and somehow the poem nudged me to connect my spirit to the natural world of spider silk, streams and trees, breezes – that comfort was all around me, holding me to its self.

++++++ Jane

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Erase the lines: I pray you not to love classifications.

The thing is like a river, from source to sea-mouth

One flowing life.

++++++ Robinson Jeffers

Klondike Lake Dam, mural by Eva Crawford

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The Beauty of Things

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water,

Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—

The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,

And unhuman nature its towering reality—

For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock

And water and sky are constant—to feel

Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural

Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.

The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,

The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962)

from Poetry, Vol. 77, No. 4, Jan., 1951

Shared by Catherine Carter, Cullowhee NC, who writes:

I’ve selected this one because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about paying attention as a holy act, maybe THE holy act, and, if not “the sole business” of poetry, at least a large part of it. So much of what we lose and destroy is because we won’t or can’t give attention; we think of the tree we cut as “ordinary”, as “just” a tree, of the insects we poison as just flaws in our experience of the world, as if our experiences of the world were all that mattered.

Along those lines, I’m also including the final poem from my book, Larvae of the Nearest Stars, “The Promise”. That poem first appeared in Still: The Journal, October 2017, and was then reprinted in the collection. Its tone is very different, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about “The Beauty of Things” when I wrote it…but it’s basically promising to do what Jeffers is talking about—paying attention to what’s all around us, what we sweep away or walk right over or destroy without ever knowing it because we think it’s “ordinary.” And I thought of this one, Bill, because of your wonderful post about the tiny, tiny flowers.

+++++++ Catherine

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The Promise

Life-root, blazing out in your golden rags.

Killdeer, skimming the soccer field,

pealing the glad word of May. Soft lamb’s

quarter, powdered with pewter dust

that might’ve come from the Horsehead

Nebula, putting spinach to shame

with your mineral riches. Wood

thrush trilling your deep flute-

notes from the high canopy, almost never

seen. Tiny henbit, more glamorous

and sexy in your freckled orchid pink

than Marilyn Monroe’s…et cetera.

Et cetera. The list goes on longer

and deeper than any human voice,

and how many hear any of you

over the clamor of ego and ad,

how many know you were ever

here? Nor can I save you

when they come with the mowers,

the poisons, nor make the world

plant milkweed for its true-born monarchs.

What I can do is what I am

doing: look for you. Listen

as you proclaim your many

names in all the tongues

of earth. Speak those names back:

as long as lichens

star this mountain’s boulder-bones

in flat seaglass rosettes, so that even the rock

blooms some wordless joy

into the day’s high air, I will

not cease. I will go on

doing my work in this world.

Catherine Carter

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Both from an ecological perspective and from Genesis’ point of view, goodness resides in the community, the web of life, in the relations of the whole biosphere.

++++++ Rabbi Ellen Bernstein

Look at the animals roaming the forest: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God’s spirit dwells within them.

++++++ Pelagius (4th century Celtic theologian)

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Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the

ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

Collected in The Golden Treasury of Poetry ; in the public domain.

Shared by Nancy Barnett, Eustis FL, who writes:

My brother Tom was a wonderful gift giver. We had lost our brother Frank in June 1962 when I was 11 years old. Tom gave me a book during that time by Louis Untermeyer, The Golden Treasury of Poetry (1959).

When I went back to school in the fall our 6th grade teacher Mrs. Heinlein asked the class to bring something to read aloud and I chose Miracles from Untermeyer’s collection. I loved the image of nature and the hopefulness of life being seen as a miracle. I knew nothing about Walt Whitman then. (The version in The Golden Treasury of Poetry was somewhat sanitized for the young reader.)

The Poet Laureate Joy Harjo noted that her love of poetry was fostered by the very same book.

++++++ Nancy

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Indeed, one outcome of my watch at the mandala has been to realize that we create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding ‘pristine’ places that will bring wonder to us.

++++++ David George Haskell

from The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, in which Dr. Haskell spent a year visiting almost every day a small circle of ground in the southern Appalachian forest, his mandala, and simply opened himself to its presence.

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Crane Migration, Platte River

I am in danger of forgetting the cranes,

their black wavering lines in the sky,

how they came as if from the past,

how they came of one mind,

wheeling, swirling over the river.

I am in danger of losing

the purling sound they make,

and the motion of their long wings.

We had stopped the car on the river road

and got out, you and I,

the wind intermittent in our faces

as if it too came from a distant place

and wavered and began again, gusting.

Line after line of cranes

came out of the horizon,

sliding overhead.

The voices of cranes

harsh and exciting.

Something old in me answered.

What did it say? Maybe it said Kneel.

I almost forgot the ancient sound,

back in time, back, and back.

The road, the two of us at the guardrail,

low scraggle of weeds flattening and rising

in wind. This is what I must retain:

my knees hit the damp sand of the roadside.

This is what I remember:

you knelt too. We were wordless together

before the birds as they landed on the sandbars

and night came on.

Marjorie Saiser

Shared by Michael Beadle, Raleigh NC, who writes:

The opening line to this poem from the anthology The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal is a call to us all: against forgetting. Against ignoring the beauty that startles us. It dares us to step deeper into the mystery, turns us into wide-eyed children again as we look up at the heavens, peer into a clear lake, gaze across a field or behold a magnificent tree or bird. This poem reminds us that nature is within range, that it has not disappeared (yet), though we humans are doing our damnedest to foul up the sky, poison the waters, plunder the earth for profit. This poem is about holding ourselves still in that moment of awe, stopping our busy lives to listen to the wind, to the flap of wings, to the crunch of gravel, the swish of tall grass. In such moments of grace and wonder, we are, quite literally, brought to our knees as we show respect for the world around us, the world that breathes into us, the world we have to be reminded of from time to time that was here long before we were and will be here long after we are gone.

++++++ Michael

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I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.

++++++ John Burroughs, naturalist

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

++++++ Henry David Thoreau, fromWalking

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.

++++++ Mary Oliver

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To celebrate EARTH DAY 2024 we are featuring seven posts of poems submitted by readers – poems by William Blake to Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers to A.R.Ammons to Linda Pastan, and by a number of contemporary poets. Check in every day or two – connect to the earth and to each other!

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Earth Day Prelude – Two

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Earth Day 2024, ecopo, Grace Paley, Joan Barasovska, Joyce Kilmer, Susan Laughter Meyers on April 17, 2024| 8 Comments »

April 17, 2024

While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.

I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning which is held within. Soul is the blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love it.

++++++ Richard Rohr

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This Hill

this hill

crossed with broken pines and maples

lumpy with the burial mounds

of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane

of ‘thirty-eight) ++ out of their rotting hearts

generations rise trying once more

to become the forest

just beyond them

tall enough to be called trees

in their youth like aspen++ a bouquet

of young beech is gathered

they still wear last summer’s leaves

the lightest brown almost translucent

how their stubbornness decorates

the winter woods

on this narrow path

ice holds the black undecaying

oak leaves in its crackling grip

oh ++ it’s become too hard to walk

++ ++ ++ a sunny patch ++ I’m suddenly

in water to my ankles ++ April

Grace Paley (1922-2007)

Shared by Joan Barasovska, Chapel Hill NC, who writes:

I’m precisely connected to this poem in several ways. Grace Paley grew up in New York City — I grew up in nearby Philadelphia — but writes occasionally about her connection to the natural world, as I do. I live in a wooded area, and although the trees surrounding me aren’t birches or aspens, in mid-March they are bare and some “still wear last summer’s leaves.” When Paley wrote “This Hill” she was an older woman, and walking in the woods was becoming difficult, though the desire was there, all true for me.

++++++ Joan

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The Day I Walked on Fire

it wasn’t fire

it was ginkgo leaves

the sun lit them yellow

they were juicy with heat

the day I walked on ginkgo leaves

I imagined they were fire

that my shoes were melting

that my feet were burning

and I felt no pain

on that autumn day

when I burned to be

a holy woman

Joan Barasovska

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When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

++++++ John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

Joyce Kilmer (1886 – 1918)

https://poets.org/poem/trees; this poem is in the public domain

Shared by Dee Neil, Elkin NC, who writes:

We recited this poem every day in Mrs. Black’s first grade class and I have always loved it. I was supposed to go camping there [Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in western North Carolina] with my son’s family last summer, but I fell and broke my arm the week before we were scheduled to go. Still on my bucket list for this year. This is on the back of a hiking journal my daughter-in-law made for me for the trip.

++++++ Dee

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Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.

++++++ Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Banding Hummingbirds

+++ San Pedro River, Arizona

+++ +++ I, who know nothing of ornithology,

wear sticker number nineteen. This release,

the last of the day, is mine. Under the awning

the ornithologist at the table puts a straw to her lips

and blows, parting the feathers to check for mites.

There are mites.

+++ +++ She cradles the bird in one hand,

sexes it, names the species (Anna’s), and figures

the approximate age. Places it in a miniature sling

and weighs it, wraps the metal band around one leg.

I walk over to the designated grassy area,

both hands in my pockets.

+++ +++ +++ The day is raw.

When it’s time, I hold out a palm, now warm.

The assistant fits the tubes of a stethoscope

to my ears, pressing the disc against my bird.

I hear a low whir, a tiny motor running in my hand.

Up to twelve hundred beats a minute, she says.

+++ I, who know so little,

barely take a breath. My bird’s head is a knob

of red iridescence on the fleshy pad of my hand.

I am nothing but a convenient warming bench,

yet for now I am that bench. Warm.

His breast is thin-bone hollow, she says,

+++ +++ where he should be round.

His eyes dark and still, his feet tucked

behind his body. He lies there, that tiny motor.

I don’t think of years ago, my mother, my father-

those I loved who, having lain down, never rose up.

For once, I know the worth,

++++++ at least to me. What I don’t know

is whether this bird in hand will rouse

the way he did earlier, pinched between thumb

and index finger and tipped toward a feeder,

when he drank with conspicuous hunger.

You could see the tongue.

Susan Laughter Meyers

from My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, Winner of the 2012 Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize

Shared by Richard Allen Taylor, Myrtle Beach SC, who writes:

I was wracking my brain and finally it occurred to me to look on my bookshelf for Susan Laughter Meyers’s My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass. There are actually several poems in the book that might be candidates for Earth Day, but I was especially attracted to this one for several reasons. It reminds me that sometimes you can tell the story through the images (even if literal) rather than trying to “explain.” (I need to be reminded of that every day, it seems.) The poem has a little mystery. (Why are they banding the hummingbirds? Do the mites present a danger to their health? Are the bones in the chest supposed to be hollow or has the bird been sick? I’ll have to look this stuff up or else I won’t sleep tonight.)

++++++ Richard

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. . . when man and nature

got married they agreed never to divorce although

they knew they could never be happy & would have only

the one child Art who would bring mostly grief

to them both . . .

++++++ Firewood, Midquest, Fred Chappell

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The Law of Love

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Richard Allen Taylor, Southern writing on March 22, 2024| 8 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Richard Allen Taylor]

What’s Happening?

+++ after Choices, a watercolor by Catherine Mainous

Of course, I recognize it right away,

this landscape where past and present

bleed into future, as I have bled,

as we all do. I start green and work

my way up, grasping at blue. Earth

always reaches for sky, the tiniest seed

pokes through saltmarsh and sawgrass,

green fingers periscopes looking for light.

I always look for dawn. No, that’s wrong.

Sometimes, I search for dark and find it.

The light comes later, after regret, guilt.

See how that diffused orange glare

in the corner blurs into a bridge

to nowhere, skeletal structure

never completed. That’s what

you get with unrequited ambition.

Beginning, middle, no end.

A purple cloud in the distance.

A crane untethered.

An unexpected answer

to an unexpected question.

Richard Allen Taylor

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She doesn’t believe in inertia. If I take both hands off the wheel for a femtosecond, she’s convinced we will instantly swerve into the embankment.

She does believe in gravity. Since my last birthday she has forbidden me from using the stepladder to hang Christmas lights on the dwarf spruce in our front yard, much less reach to get the star on top.

She absolutely rejects Heisenberg’s principal of uncertainty. Whether I can detect them or not, my keys are fixed in place right where I left them.

She’s a little iffy on the conservation of angular momentum. If I accelerate into a curve to maintain a constant forward velocity, she wants to know why I’m speeding.

She accepts evolutionary biology without complaint but wanders from the straight and narrow of taxonomic hierarchy. Lizards and toads she seeks out as cute; snakes are OK only behind glass; spiders and gigantic roaches, even millipedes, she captures under a paper cup, slides a birthday card beneath, and relocates into the yard; fruit flies and ants must die.

And the law of love? It is, of course, not exclusively physics and biology. It also includes the law of culture and connection, of which she is founder and curator. When a particular issue of National Geographic reaches its twentieth birthday, she tears out each article worth saving and files it, astrophysics to zoology. She will let me re-read them if I but ask.

One more thing about the law of love: it seems to disobey Newton’s third law of motion. For each of my own actions – and how often they do violate something – there is a reaction, but thank God not opposite and equal. However sharp her initial glance and inflection, the ultimate consequence so far has been forgiveness. This is one universe I am happy to live in.

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The Second Law of the Apple

If the first law was not to take

the first bite, lest you be banished

from the garden, the second law

ought to be to finish what you start,

meaning the first bite obligates you

to a second, and a third, and so on

until the apple is eaten, except

for the core, which contains

the seeds, and sine you will be

traveling anyway, away from

the garden that spit you out,

you might as well learn

banishment from one place is not

the end, but merely another beginning,

and what you do with the seeds

is everything.

Richard Allen Taylor

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Richard Allen Taylor is part of the holy jangle of things / fastened to the belt loop of a forgetful world. The poems in Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems are able to weave from the commonplace and humbly wonderful things of this world a sweet sadness . . . droll observations . . . life-giving joy. And some good jokes.

We knew this first collection since Richard’s wife’s death from leukemia would build a house for grief and healing. Who knew that Karen Carpenter would lend such a hand, but Richard weaves remembrance and biography together into powerful metaphors for attachment and loss. These poems speak to grieving with the whispered voice of his late wife, Julie – a mellow bell rings in the canyon. / And the canyon is me – as well as in Richard’s own sure voice of seeking, his wisdom steadily revealed as one that doesn’t cry for answers but is happy to linger with the important questions. All the old questions / that rise in the wake of storms: each of us must confront and accept these questions if we are to be fully alive. Autumn fades, winter enfolds us, but the seasons continue to turn. At the end of everything is not sadness but wonder, friendship, and love.

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Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems is available from Main Street Rag HERE

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I Write to You About Julie, My Wife

I named a star after her. Astronomers call it

HD 10180. Both Julies—the woman I remember

and her eponymous star—emit a kind and generous

light. The star deserves a name that twinkles, and she

deserves the star. I never called her HD 10180,

but often call the star Julie. I chose it out of billions

because, like you, Julie got along so well with others—

none of that blasting the neighbors with deadly gamma

ray bursts, the way some pulsars do. And like the star,

my wife, when she was alive, had a family that orbited

her adoringly. Astronomers have identified a possible

gas giant, designated HD 10180g, residing comfortably

in Julie’s habitable zone, and—though the giant’s crushing

gravity could never support planetary life, they may find

moons that do. Suspected of strong winds and colorful

bands, without Julie’s life-giving warmth and shine,

HD 10180g would be little more than a vast frozen cloud,

a derelict adrift in deep space. I wish I could point out Julie

to you, but it’s in the constellation Hydrus, which is only

observed from the Southern Hemisphere, and, though

brighter than our own sun, Julie resides one hundred and

twenty-seven light-years away. We’d need a telescope.

I understand your concern that the striking similarity

between the designations HD 10180 and HD 10180g

might confuse some observers. Don’t worry.

To anyone who ever saw us together, it’s obvious

I am the gas giant, and she is the star.

Richard Allen Taylor

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ECOPOETRY FOR EARTH DAY 2024

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

+++ — John Muir

VERSE & IMAGE is seeking poetry to celebrate Earth Day, April 22, throughout National Poetry Month. Do you have a favorite poem that speaks to universal interconnectedness, as in the above quotation? Send it to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com by April 10 and we may share it in one of several posts dedicated to living together on our living planet.

Please read these guidelines:

Deadline April 10, 2024, midnight Eastern Daylight Time USA

Send ONE poem by any author except yourself addressing the theme of connections.

Include the full text of the poem in the body of an email or as a .DOC or .RTF attachment to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com. Please add info about where the poem is published.

Also include a personal statement – how do you feel connected to this poem? What does it mean to you? How has it connected you to the earth? [suggest 100 words or so; may be edited for length]

Visit GriffinPoetry.com between April 15 and April 30 to see if your poem has been selected for presentation.

Optional: if you submit one poem by an author other than yourself, you may also submit one poem on the same theme that you have written. We prefer previously published – include acknowledgments.

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